David W. Blight, “Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition”, uses an opinion spot in the NYTimes to tell a story I didn’t know:
… In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.
By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.
It was a necessary step: when he registered to vote under his new identity, “Douglass,” a name he took from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem “Lady of the Lake,” this fugitive slave was effectively an illegal immigrant in Massachusetts. He was still the legal “property” of Thomas Auld, his owner in St. Michaels, Md., and susceptible, under the federal fugitive slave law, to capture and return to slavery at any time….
So far, so good; you should read the whole thing. But I am dubious about his “sarcastic” proposal:
… [A] group of English antislavery friends purchased his freedom in 1846 for £150 ($711 at the time in American dollars). Douglass was in the midst of a triumphal two-year speaking tour of Ireland, Scotland and England; when he returned to America in 1847, he moved to New York in possession of his official “manumission papers.” He was free and legal, eventually owned property and could vote. Valued and purchased as a commodity, he could now claim to be a citizen.
In Douglass’s greatest speech, the Fourth of July oration in 1852, he argued that often the only way to describe American hypocrisy about race was with “scorching irony,” “biting ridicule” and “withering sarcasm.” Today’s Republican Party seems deeply concerned with rooting out voter fraud of the kind Douglass practiced. So, with Douglass’s story as background, I have a modest proposal for it. In the 23 states where Republicans have either enacted voter-ID laws or shortened early voting hours in urban districts, and consistent with their current reigning ideology, they should adopt a simpler strategy of voter suppression.
To those potentially millions of young, elderly, brown and black registered voters who, despite no evidence of voter fraud, they now insist must obtain government ID, why not merely offer money? Pay them not to vote. Give each a check for $711 in honor of Frederick Douglass. Buy their “freedom,” and the election. Call it the “Frederick Douglass Voter Voucher.”…
I believe this falls in the category of scholarly writing known as ‘too cute by half’. Reverend Jonathan Swift died of a broken heart, partially because the upper-class targets of his original Modest Proposal were less shocked by the bland cruelty of his intended upper-class English targets than by the incidental vulgarities of his satire (encouraging lazy young Irish bucks to impregnate multiple women, for profit– the horror!). I’m sure Paul Ryan would be all too ready to offer vouchers to non-voters, but I don’t want Blight’s op-ed to end up as another EvenTheLiberal citation in the wingnut bible of voter supression.
Tom Levenson
Blight’s a piker. Adjusting for inflation, $711 in 1852 is worth over 27 times as much in current dollars — around $19,000.
Even agreeing with you about the failure of the satire, this does give a pointed view of what the Republicans are stealing from American citizens when they steal their votes.
Bubblegum Tate
Just an hour or so ago, a wingnut blog commenter, after regurgitating the “47% pay NO taxes” bullshit, concluded with:
I asked him to confirm that he wanted to re-institute poll taxes. His response:
MikeJ
@Bubblegum Tate: I believe only citizens of DC should be allowed to vote for president. They pay taxes and get no voting representation in congress.
Brachiator
OK. Mitt Romney should not be able to vote, by this standard.
Maybe he should also be ineligible to run for elective office.
Maude
@Bubblegum Tate:
Go back and let him have it. It’s not for him to decide who gets to vote.
WereBear
@Bubblegum Tate: What a jerk. If implemented, it would be “property owners” and then it would be “property owners above a certain minimum” and so forth.
Idiots think they are special when they are completely expendable.
Mnemosyne
@Bubblegum Tate:
He does realize that most of the people who pay no income tax do so because they have a mortgage and kids that they can deduct to get a full refund of the taxes they paid, right? IOW, most of the “no income tax” payers are probably Republican voters, not Democrats.
On second thought, don’t tell him. I’ll really enjoy waltzing into the polling place with my 1040 while he stands at the door unable to get in and sputtering that he was talking about those other people who don’t pay taxes, not himself, because he never realized that he was reducing his tax liability down to zero with all of his deductions.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
I read somewhere today that the Romney campaign has so much money that they are having trouble figuring out how to spend it. I proposed they send everyone a check. Either pay them not to vote, or pay them to vote Romney.
Some Loser
Frederick Douglass, one of the first progressives. Too bad he wasn’t our first black president.
LanceThruster
@WereBear:
The phrase too stupid to live comes to mind.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Bubblegum Tate:
I believe that if you have no vote, you shouldn’t have to pay any taxes at all. No taxation without representation, remember?
Meaning sales taxes, local taxes, whatever.
xian
I heard Emanuel Cleaver on Tavis Smiley’s show today and the Congressional Black Caucus is kicking off a bus tour in Cincinnati with a big-headliners concert that’s free to anyone who can show voter ID. Anyone with out idea can be registered on the spot and they will pay any costs involved.
That’s how you do.
LanceThruster
@Some Loser:
One of the fascinating things I learned about him was regarding the schism with the women’s rights movement.
Frederick Douglass was one of the few men present at the pioneer woman’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. His support of women’s rights never wavered although in 1869 he publicly disagreed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who called for women’s suffrage simultaneously with voting rights for black men, arguing that prejudice and violence against black men made their need for the franchise more pressing.
Yet he was also the vice-presidential running mate of the first woman ever to run for president.
What pioneering trailblazers.
Anne Laurie
@Tom Levenson:
Well, I can actually understand the Yalie calculation here: Karl Rove would never suggest the Kochs hand those vote-losers a check for more than most of them make in a year. But $711 is probably a month’s rent/mortgage, or several car payments, or enough to fix the junker or get the utilities paid off. Besides, ‘711’ is an inherently funny number in modern American pop culture.
Bubblegum Tate
@Maude:
I did at first, then I decided that a better tactic was to thank him. He had made himself the blog’s Todd Akin, saying plainly what he was supposed to say only in coded language–he made no mention of “voter fraud” like wingnuts are supposed to when they talk about voter suppression. I also got him to admit that the only reason he had to support Romney was hatred of Obama. I considered it a job well done.
Anne Laurie
@LanceThruster: That, I did know. And yet there are people who think the 2008 “Who ‘deserves’ to go first, Hilary or Obama?” controversy was historically unprecedented. I suspect that Karl Rove, history major, was not one of those people. Pitting two historically oppressed groups against each other to fight for scraps is a very old tool for the One Percenters.
LanceThruster
@Anne Laurie:
Absolutely. Divide and conquer.
Ohio Mom
@xian: I admit I don’t read the Cincinnati Enquirer all that carefully but surprise, surprise I don’t think they’ve mentioned this. No space left over, I guess, after all those articles touting R & R.
On a related note, our absentee ballots came today so I can stop my annual worrying that I’ve somehow fallen off the rolls.
Maude
@Bubblegum Tate:
That’s the ticket.
AA+ Bonds
I’d suggest everyone listen to this series of lectures by David Blight. They are free and downloadable, good for wherever you listen to music or the radio. He does not underestimate the cleverness of his audience, that is for sure. (You will also occasionally get to hear him dress students down in the lecture hall for reading the paper while he’s talking, etc., which is fun, considering what they are paying for a seat in his class.)
If you don’t tend to listen to things like this, there are also transcripts available at the link.
America desperately needs Blight’s perspective on many issues, including race, the South, and the history of American electoral politics. If he had the time, I’d prefer that the Times take weekly column space from one (or two) of their bilge-pumpers and give it to Blight instead.
arguingwithsignposts
@Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937:
Well they clearly haven’t been using any of it to buy a clue upgrade for the motherboard.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
WIN
PurpleGirl
@arguingwithsignposts: Brilliant.
Chris Johnson
A bit OT, but Blight is a wonderful lecturer. You can listen to his entire course about the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Yale site. It’s worth the time, especially the way in which he demolishes the whole “the Civil War was not about slavery” winger narrative. Here’s the link to the course:
http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119
freelancer
@AA+ Bonds:
I followed a link to this series last time someone posted it in a thread earlier this summer and I’m about halfway through it. Fascinating stuff. Blight’s got a lot to say about Douglass, did his dissertation on him.
Dean Booth
@LanceThruster:
I highly recommend this biography of Victoria Woodhull. She is one of my heros.
Seth Owen
If you pay no income tax and have no vote on national decisions maybe you should be exempt from the draft when those income-tax paying Spartsns vote for a war, too. Bet that shit stops as soon as Tagg gets his draft notice.
Emerald
@AA+ Bonds: I also highly recommend Blight’s Yale lectures. Just finished watching them. He spares no ammunition, and leaves no doubt about what the Civil War was about: slavery. Despite the constant denials of the South that it was about anything but slavery, sorry, it was about slavery. Blight proves it with their own words at the time.
States rights? Hah. There was only one “states right” the Confederates cared about: slavery.
I’ll also recommend a wonderful book about an earlier time that will make John Quincy Adams one of your heroes: Arguing About Slavery by William Lee Miller. It’s about how Adams fought and finally defeated the gag rule against talking about slavery in the U.S. Congress.
Blight is marvelous, although I agree that his “solution” in his op-ed doesn’t quite make the grade, even in sarcasm.